About Me

I am a graduate student of Psychology at Rutgers University researching how human emotions (e.g., pride, contempt) relate to and interact with: (1) prosocial behavior, (2) social and political judgments, and (3) job performance. I am also working on research at the Health, Emotion, and Behavior lab at Yale University, investigating how social and emotional learning curricula influence teacher and student interactions and outcomes.

WHAT IS THE SOCIAL BRAIN?

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Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, & Ara Norenzayan (2010)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic [WEIRD] societies. Our findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature, on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity."

Steven Pinker

Honor: the strange commodity that exists because everyone believes that every else believes that it exists.

Shakespeare

Conscience: I'll not meddle with it, it is a dangerous thing, it makes a man a coward; a man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear, but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbour's wife, but it detects him: 'tis a blushing shame-faced spirit, that mutinies in a man's bosom; it fills one full of obstacles: it made me once restore a purse of gold, that I found; it beggars any man that keeps it: it is turned out of all towns and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live well, endeavors to trust to himself, and live without it. [Richard III]

Paul Bloom

Emotions set goals and establish priorities. And without them you wouldn't do anything, you couldn't do anything. Your desire to come to class to study, to go out with friends, to read a book, to raise a family, would be virtually non-existent. Life would be impossible without those emotions.....

Bob Dylan

Happy...anyone can be happy...what's the purpose of that?....

Francis Crick

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: 'you're nothing but a pack of neurons.'....

Richard Dawkins

If a child has had bad teaching in mathematics, it is accepted that a resulting deficiency can be remedied by extra-good teaching in the following year. But any suggestion that the child's deficiency might have a genetic origin is likely to be greeted with something approaching despair. If it's in the genes, it is determined and nothing can be done about it. This is pernicious nonsense on an almost astrological scale. Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principle no different from each other. Some may be harder to reverse, others may be easy. What did genes do to deserve their sinister, juggernaut-like reputation? Why are genes thought to be so much more fixed and inescapable in their effects than television, nuns or books?....

Simon Baron-Cohen

To be a man is to suffer from a particularly mild form of autism.....

Dan Gilbert

We have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodities we are constantly chasing.....

David Brooks

WE construct ourselves through our behavior.....

Shakespeare

Sure, this robe of mine doth change my disposition.....

Philip Roth

And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims?....

Leo Tolstoy

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.....

Charles Darwin

Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write.....

Noam Chomsky

No one would take seriously the proposal that a human organism learns through experience to have arms rather than wings, or that the basic structure of particular organs results from accidental experience. [Language] proves to be no less marvelous and intricate than these physical structures. Why, then, should we not study the acquisition of a cognitive structure like language more or less as we study some complex bodily organ?....

Aldous Huxley

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.....

Herman Melville

Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads.....

V. S. Ramachandran

The human brain is made up of one-hundred billion neurons - and each neuron forms about a thousand to ten-thousand contacts with other neurons - so the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, that is to say, potential brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.....

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

“Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.” (Emerson)

In the June issue of Nature Neuroscience, the investigator, Josef Rauschecker, PhD, and his co-author, Sophie Scott, PhD, a neuroscientist at University College, London, say that both human and non-human primate studies have confirmed that speech, one important facet of language, is processed in the brain along two parallel pathways, each of which run from lower- to higher-functioning neural regions.

These pathways are dubbed the 'what' and 'where' streams and are roughly analogous to how the brain processes sight, but are located in different regions, says Rauschecker, a professor in the department of physiology and biophysics and a member of the Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Sciences.

Both pathways begin with the processing of signals in the auditory cortex, located inside a deep fissure on the side of the brain underneath the temples - the so-called "temporal lobe."

Information processed by the "what" pathway then flows forward along the outside of the temporal lobe, and the job of that pathway is to recognize complex auditory signals, which include communication sounds and their meaning (semantics).

The "where" pathway is mostly in the parietal lobe, above the temporal lobe, and it processes spatial aspects of a sound - its location and its motion in space - but is also involved in providing feedback during the act of speaking.

What is so interesting to Rauschecker is that although speech and language are considered to be uniquely human abilities, the emerging picture of brain processing of language suggests "in evolution, language must have emerged from neural mechanisms at least partially available in animals," he says.

"Speech, or the early process of language, is well modeled by animal communication systems, and these studies now demonstrate that primate auditory cortex, across species, displays the same patterns of hierarchical structure, topographic mapping, and streams of functional processing," Rauschecker says.

"There appears to be a conservation of certain processing pathways through evolution in humans and nonhuman primates."

"But mostly, we are fascinated by the fact that humans can make such exquisite sense of the slight variation in sound waves that reach our ears, and only lately have we been able to model how the brain knows how to attach meaning to these sounds in terms of communication."